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Justice Clarence Thomas, on the matter of judicial precedent, as quoted by Myron Magnet in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal:

“Stare decisis is not an inexorable command,” Justice Thomas observes in [Franchise Tax Board v] Hyatt. He has said elsewhere: “I think that the Constitution itself, the written document, is the ultimate stare decisis.”

So he’s gonna hold America’s infrastructure hostage, right, over the issue of investigations[.]

What’s being held hostage, exactly? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), just minutes before a scheduled meeting in which Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), and Republican leadership were to negotiate infrastructure projects, Pelosi, with Schumer’s prior agreement and support, accused Trump of impeachable behavior. The only plausible reason for the timing of Pelosi’s accusation was to blow up those negotiations. Progressive-Democrats didn’t want those negotiations to go forward; they didn’t want Trump to look good against the backdrop of election season and their efforts to make him look bad during this season with their faux investigations.

President Donald Trump has said that he’ll do infrastructure negotiations and legislation after the Progressive-Democrats end their investigations of his administration, not before. Pointing out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) bad faith approach (my term, not Trump’s) to any such negotiations, he said that

he had watched House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…accuse him of a “coverup” in remarks to reporters shortly before their scheduled infrastructure meeting at the White House.

[O]n May 1, New York’s state Senate voted to let strikers get benefits one week after walking off the job—essentially putting them on equal footing with those who are laid off.
If Governor Andrew Cuomo signs this bill, he’ll effectively be using New York’s unemployment-insurance program to subsidize union strikes, upending the balance of power between workers and management.

Union strikes are little indistinguishable from extortion, except that they’re legal. They’re used to threaten a company’s ability to function—to survive—unless they surrender to union demands. “Nice little business you got here. Be too bad if something was to happen to it.”

“It used to be Congress versus the administration; now it feels like the administration is at least coming around to the Republican point of view” on trade, a Democratic congressional aide said, adding that “it’s going to be hard for them to work with Democrats in a productive way.”

Never mind the Progressive-Democrats’ refusal to work with the White House or Republicans in a productive way. “A productive way” means, as it always has, doing it the Progressive-Democrats’ way.

On Fox News‘ Claremont, New Hampshire town hall with Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg Sunday, Buttigieg had this to say about abolishing our Electoral College.

“States don’t vote, people vote. …if we’re going to call ourselves a democracy,” the US should move to a popular vote system.

When the moderator, Chris Wallace, asked further about that, particularly comparing the voice of small States like New Hampshire with large States like California, Buttigieg gave an unresponsive answer about how New Hampshire wouldn’t be harmed by abolishing the Electoral College because New Hampshire is one of the first-to-vote-in-primaries States.

The Liberal, Living Constitution, wing of the Supreme Court is up in arms over losing a case with precedential implications. The proximate case concerned Franchise Tax Board v Hyatt, in which the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent that held that States are not required to grant legal immunity to other States in interstate lawsuits. I won’t go into that because that’s not the crux of the matter.

Instead, that Liberal wing, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, objected to the precedent reversal not on its merits or on the merits of precedent overturning/preservation, but on the premise that overturning this precedent would lead to overturning the abortion ban restrictions in Roe v Wade.

Indeed, they are, and the one the People’s Republic of China has been inflicting on us for years is especially so. For the duration of the PRC’s economic war—of which its trade “war” is just one campaign—they’ve been conducting cyber espionage, stealing our intellectual property, extorting technology transfer as a condition of doing business inside the PRC, demanding government-approved backdoors into our companies’ core software as another condition of doing business there, even poisoning the powdered milk, pet food, and plywood they sell to us.

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Je Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia Saturday at his first official rally.

I have some comments on excerpts from his speech—excerpts because he repeated a few themes time after time after time for 30 minutes.

Instead of debating our opponents, we demonize them. Instead of questioning judgments, we question their motives. Instead of listening, we shout. Instead of looking for solutions, we look to score political points. … This politics is pulling us apart, ripping this country apart at the seams. Our politics today traffic in division, and our President is the Divider in Chief.

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2 + 2 = 4
--Polish proverb

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
--John Adams

Nothing in the universe has a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts.
--Admiral Hamish Alexander, RMN

Dawn is nature's way of telling you to go to bed.
And to just stay there until the evil yellow disk is gone again.
--Anonymous

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.
--Aristotle

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
--Chief Justice John Roberts.

A yawn is a silent scream for coffee.
--Shane Mclean

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.
--Abraham Lincoln

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Who is this Pogue?

I'm a USAF vet, a quasi-retired Systems Engineer, and writer. In my spare time, I turn exotic woods into piles of sawdust and kindling, out of which occasionally sticks a piece of furniture that doesn't look too bad from a distance, with my glasses off.
Oh, and I have a rather dyspeptic view of Big Government.

Contact

eehines1473 -at- yahoo dot com

The image in the header is from NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity on its 11-year anniversary on the Red Planet. [I]t has used its Pancam (fancy name for its panoramic camera) to snap this wide view from atop "Cape Tribulation," a part of Endeavour Crater's rim that sits at a height of 440 feet. That's 80 percent of the height of the Washington Monument, NASA says.

The photo was taken on January 6 and released by NASA January 22, 2015.